Sunday Independent
18 Mar 2001
Between the drugs, the booze and the fighting, it's a wonder that the ex-Pogue is still alive. John Masterson hails a heroic drunk
HE SHOULD be dead. He has done all the right things. From punk fights with no quarter asked or given, to hoovering up cocaine and anything else that came into his path, to getting a head-start on a life of drinking by starting as a five-year-old in Tipperary, Shane has brought Irish excess to a level that the former great Irish boozers could not even have contemplated.
And yet he has given us beautiful love songs like A Rainy Night in Soho:
"I took shelter from a shower
And I stepped into your arms
On a rainy night in Soho
The wind was whistling all its charms
I sang you all my sorrows
You told me all your joys."
There were wonderful tender moments and haunting melodies like Summer in Siam, and Christmas isn't Christmas until you've heard Fairytale of New York (written with Pogue Jem Finer) played over and over, but never played to death because it is just such a good song. And I don't think you would have got very good odds that we would be mourning Kirsty MacColl, his fellow-singer on that track, before Shane.
Now long-term girlfriend Victoria Clarke has published her extended conversation with Shane. They have been together more than a decade since they fell into bed discussing Irish poetry in London, and she still affectionately calls him Sweet Pea.
Maybe Victoria has played a role in keeping Shane with us. To say she keeps him on the straight and narrow would be doing the truth a massive disservice, but he would probably enjoy a chat and few pints with her more than any of the other excesses and temptations that abound. There were years of women throwing themselves at him, and fans offering to lend him their girlfriend for the night: "It was one of the first really mad things I noticed, you know, people giving you their girlfriend. I'd never dream of giving anyone my girlfriend. I don't care who the fucker is."
I have met Shane only twice, but enough to see that the acres of coverage are not some line fed by the record company.
The first time was around 1986. He came off a plane from London at about 10pm with a bottle of port in a brown paper bag and he was down to the last inch. All he wanted to do was buy a pair of socks. I doubt if he had slept and I know none of the alcohol was poured down the sink. Absolutely polite, voice slurred, he went about the arranged interview and then disappeared off into what was probably one of many lost weekends in Dublin.
It was a bit like RD Laing on the Late Late Show. He makes more sense drunk that most people do sober. You just have to take the time to listen. Which is why I liked the idea of Victoria recording lengthy conversations and putting them down in print with all the pauses taken out. It is the closest one could get to meeting him sober. All the ferocity of his life is there his loves, his values, the gutters he has crawled in.
This is the man that Christy Moore so dearly loves. Why? Because, as Moore wrote on an album sleeve, "more than any writer I've heard, his lyrics bring me to a place I know he is a man of raw emotion and understated pain that comes crawling out of his lyrics like the madness crawling out of a mountain".
Ten years later, I watched him work with Christy. A galaxy of stars were assembled for the Christy Moore Late Late Special and above all Christy wanted Shane to be there. Shane wasn't in great shape when he got to RT? but that was no surprise. Then the two men sat down in a corner of a coffee bar and Christy taught Shane Spancel Hill.
And everyone backed off and watched two greats at work with a love and respect that set them apart from people who have never gone to the edge and taken a good look over.
Shane's early years were spent on his uncle John's farm with his mother's extended family in Tipperary, where he used to help ploughing, making hay, and "killing chickens".
Victoria is from hippie stock in West Cork, and the "love and peace" end of the spectrum that she came from is a long way from Shane's upbringing.
In Victoria's book, Shane remembers the farmhouse kitchen, "which was the main room of the house. The men would hold their fingers around their noses and blow the snot on the floor and then spit on it. Which is where I picked up the habit."
Shane tells it as it was, and despite their long time together he can still appal his lover. He continues.
"My uncle Mick Guilfoyle never took a bath from the day he was born. Or at least from the day his mother died, because he didn't see any reason to then when he was 87 he got taken into hospital for a minor ailment and they gave him a bath. And he wasn't immune to the air because he was completely covered in black dirt, so he got sick immediately and he died of exposure to fresh air. That may have something to do with my aversion to taking a bath now."
Victoria couldn't wait to get out of Ireland. She hated the place with much the same intensity as Shane loves it. He grew up steeped in the republicanism that is still at the centre of his thinking. Looking back, Shane says he still feels guilt that he didn't lay down his life for Ireland.
"Not that I would have helped the situation. But I felt ashamed that I didn't have the guts to join the IRA. And the Pogues was my way of overcoming that guilt. And looking back on it I think I made the right choice."
Shane's mixture of religion, republicanism and his own unique value system goes back to those early days. The difference between a mortal and a venial sin is ingrained in him.
"I was indoctrinated. Because I believed the people who were telling me it. And the person in particular who was telling me it used to buy me cigarettes, back horses with me, do the Irish Sweepstakes with me, and booze they were all devout Catholics in that household ... so anything they told me I believed. So My Fight for Irish Freedom and the Catechism were the two most important books I read."
To this day he wishes he stayed longer on the farm in Tipperary. The early years were a blissful mix of history, religion, music, staying up all night and, even at that tender age, drink.
"They believed in letting a child do what it wanted as long as it went to Mass. I was allowed to smoke, drink and bet, as a child, all of which are regarded by puritans as bad habits, because I came from a very anti-puritan background. Sex was the one thing that was a no-no, sex and blasphemy. You were allowed to say fuck as much as you wanted to, but that isn't blasphemy, that isn't saying anything against Jesus or His Holy Mother."
The philosophy with drink was that if you give them enough when they're young, they will be able to handleit later on. In Shane's mind, it taught him to respectalcohol.
The aim with religion was to instil the one true faith.
"The Roman Catholic Mass is one of the most beautiful experiences a human being can be subjected to. And I use the words 'be subjected to' advisedly. It's not something you want to do, it's something you're beaten into doing. But then once you're there, right, the whole thing takes you over and you go WOW! OH, OH, OH."
For his early years, Shane's parents were living and working in England and wanted him to grow up in the countryside and he didn't join them in England until he was seven. He was born on Christmas Day 1957, his parents having married the previous year. His mother was a model and a real looker she was Colleen of the Year in 1954. And she was a singer. Her father had died of alcoholic poisoning when she was three.
Shane's father had tried his hand at writing, spoke with a natural wit, and ended up working for a department store in Dublin and was later transferred to England. His grandfather had been well-off but had blown it all on a combination of whiskey, women and gambling. Maurice MacGowan and Shane's mother met in a pub in Dublin and courted for about seven years.
The move to England was hugely traumatic for Shane. The Tipperary set-up may not sound ideal, but whatever it was, it was stability, and England, by contrast, was a disaster. Soon he was in rootless suburban Britain, fighting, bullying, being bullied, in trouble, getting expelled from the prestigious Westminster school fairly rapidly and embarking on a succession of schools.
About the only positive thing that was going on was that he was still reading everything he could (he read well at age three) and teachers could see that he would write like no other kid in the school.
"I was just doing what I could do naturally I'd learned from Irish people, ironically enough, who speak the best English in the world. Well, it's a toss-up between the Irish and the Scots. It certainly isn't the English or the Americans."
And his mother gave him a push. "There was none of this, 'Yes, darling, I'll get you anything, pet.' It was 'Get your arse in gear and work. You're going to do the things that I never got the opportunity to do. You're special and you're going to be famous and I'm going to make sure you are ...' and she drummed into me over and over again: 'Don't get married. Or if you do get married, marry somebody strong. Don't marry a wimp. Don't marry a stupid cow and don't marry a snob. Don't marry anybody who will take second best always put yourself first. Don't worry about me. All I want is for you to make it."'
Shane was out of school as fast as possible and making a few bob filling shelves in a supermarket. He started out as a freak.
"A freak was someone who was too young to be a hippy, who didn't believe in Peace and Love or Space Trips or Ley Lines or any of that shit. We just believed in Hard Drugs, Loud Rock and Roll and Reasonably Long Hair. We despised hippies, who wore Afghans. We wore leather jackets, and brothel-creepers or winkle-pickers, with jeans or leather pants."
And then along came punk. Drugs, drink and music. Numerous police cells. A spell in the "loony bin". All while still a teenager. And fights, fights and more fights, one particularly brutal one when he was mistaken for a 'Ted'.
"There were six of them and whichever way I looked at it they had me. So I just lay on the floor, crouched in an embryonic position, protecting my balls and my head and pretending to be unconscious they thought they were kicking me to death, so I pretended to be dead. They all had blakies. You know, metal tips on their boots any guy with guts just uses a knuckleduster."
MacGowan was picked up by the police some minutes later. His nose was broken and hospital was the only place to go. The six lads were probably just a few hundred yards away, and having listened with horror, Victoria asked Shane why he didn't shop them. She had forgotten about the MacGowan ethic.
"You don't ever tell the pigs about anything. It's humiliating to have the pigs doing your fucking work for you. If you can't fucking fight your way out of a jam, then that's just bad luck."
By now, Shane had done a stint as a barman, where he drank a bottle of vodka for lunch and derived great amusement from serving Americans cheap whiskey when they paid for top-of-the-range. Next there was a stint in a record shop and then the Sex Pistols changed the world. Now this was music, and before long he had written a punk "fanzine" and was being seen around the right places enough to be the face of '77. A few bits and pieces of garage bands, and the ingredients for the Pogues or Pogue Mahone, as they were at first until somebody told the BBC it was Irish for "kiss my arse" were in place. Suddenly it was big-time sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.
Today, Shane values nothing more than his songs. Whatever happens, he is proud to appear on the songwriters' roll of honour. For this immortality he was prepared to sacrifice everything.
"You don't care if you sleep in the fucking street, as long as they are playing my music ... that's the attitude you have to have. Like, you can't even think about a house, or a car, or fucking anything you've just got to be fucking overwhelmed by the idea of getting your music on to a piece of fucking vinyl!"
Success came fast, and all the problems with it. In the long run it all burst apart, and on the last page of this long conversation with Victoria, Shane handwrites an apology to the Pogues, the managers, and anyone he has insulted in this recollection of those hectic years. Shane's view is that the music was getting lost. Others would say he had got lost beyond redemption and he probably wouldn't argue with that. He hated the touring, and even the perks soon lost their appeal.
"In the dressing room, after the gig, there would be loads of girls who all wanted to go to bed with you. It's such a big hassle getting laid. You screw them and then you have to put up with them for the rest of the night. I'm not really the kind of guy who can screw a girl and then kick her out of the room."
So Shane embraced monogamy. It is easier: "Promiscuity leaves you empty." But one feels that the real loves were drink and drugs. And some of the drug exploits are truly awesome. He describes one night with massive quantities of LSD where he begins the night listening to Madame Butterfly, and soon embarks on starting World War III in his head, then holding a world summit in his flat, and being found the next morning with blood all over his face having eaten his Beach Boys' Greatest Hits album "in order to demonstrate the USA's cultural redundancy".
Back to the drink. St John of God's didn't work, nor AA, nor NA. Mostly because he didn't want any of them to work.
"Anything works, if you believe in it, but I don't personally believe God helps piss-artists and junkies, I think he's too busy helping starving people. I think piss-artists and junkies are whingeing toads who should help themselves. I've always helped myself."
In response to the question, "How do you feel about the idea of never drinking or taking any drugs at all? Just being a natural human being?", Shane thinks for a moment.
"I don't think it would suit me, y'know."
Never a truer word.